Our View: Cuts keep district out of the red, but raise questions

The past few months in the Iowa City Community School District have been ripe with worry and rumor over how Superintendent Steve Murley and his administrative team would come up with a plan to cut $3.622 million in expenses from the budget for the 2014-15 school year.

The good news on that topic is that the worst-case speculations ended Tuesday when the administration presented — and the School Board approved — a plan for reducing next year’s budget without having to lay off any current district employees. The bad news, unfortunately, is that the budget gets trimmed largely through not replacing retiring employees, implementing various “efficiencies,” increasing class sizes and cutting back on some of the district’s foreign language, music and athletic programs.

And that bad news is made all the worse because the administration decided to wait until basically the last possible moment to reveal the details of the plan to the public. Tuesday’s work session was the first time that regular board members had seen the numbers — leaving them only a few hours to digest the information before voting to approve the adjusted budget.

We’re somewhat sympathetic with just how much the administration is under the gun. After all, state law requires the budget for the next school year be certified by April 15, and the district also has to notify teachers of any job reassignments by April 30. Not to mention that the district really needs to start setting aside more money if it is going to be able to afford the additional operating expenses that will come with opening new schools over the next few years.

We also can understand the administration’s frustrations in dealing with, on the one hand, a federal government that is cutting back on funding the district had grown dependent on and, on the other hand, a state government that is refusing to set allowable growth rates for the 2015-16 school year — forcing administrators to start preparing for the worst so they don’t risk suddenly finding themselves going into the red.

Yet administrators also seem fearful of repeating the public clamor from back in 2011 that accompanied a last-minute budget cutting proposal that would have eliminated about two dozen teaching positions. (That earlier plan was scuttled after the board gave the superintendent permission to reduce the amount of money usually kept in the district’s reserves from the normal 5 percent of the budget down to 3 percent. Such a solution isn’t possible this year, however, given that the reserve amount already is dipping below 2 percent and, if no changes are made, is projected to hit zero.)

But the superintendent and administrative team have been talking about the need for these cuts since last fall. And after all the months of rumors, it’s unfortunate they waited to release the details of those cuts until the last scheduled board meeting before April 15. Without at least a little advance notice, many of the people most affected by the cuts didn’t even know they needed to be on hand to offer their comments Tuesday.

Now that the veil of secrecy has been lifted, a full list of cuts (along with an explanation of each cut) can be found at http://bit.ly/1lTO9jY. The district also tries to explain those cuts — along with the entire budget process — in a broader context in the “FY 2015 Budget Blueprint” available at http://bit.ly/1lNRYV6.

But all that explanatory information would have been more helpful if the details of the cuts had made available to the public — let alone to the board members — well in advance of Tuesday’s meeting. In fact, it’s too bad the financial picture painted in the “Budget Blueprint” didn’t play a much larger role in last year’s facilities planning process. If it had, then the public might already have had a fuller sense of the trade-offs required by the community’s decision to build newer, bigger schools without closing more older, smaller ones.

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